Wednesday, May 20, 2009

Dick Eastman of Eastman's Online Genealogy Newsletter has a new interview at Roots Television with Sylvie Tremblay, who is apparently now Chief of the Canadian Genealogy Centre (CGC) at Library and Archives Canada (LAC) / Bibliothèque et Archives Canada (BAC). Dick interviewed her during the New England Regional Genealogical Conference (NERGC) which was just held in Manchester, New Hampshire, USA.

In the interview, she talked about both the on-site and on-line areas of the Canadian Genealogy Centre, and as John D. Reid notes, she had some statistics, for example, that there were 5,000 visitors in person last year and 7 million page views on-line (double the number of pages viewed the previous year). I thought she said that the Canadian Genealogy Centre received a total of 8,000 queries last year; 4,000 of these by telephone. I found that interesting. (Well, odd, really. I'd like to see an easy to find fact sheet of historical statistics like this on the LAC website.)

The most popular CGC database on-line, she said, is (still?) that for the World War I Canadian Expeditionary Force service records. Although this is titled Soldiers of the First World War - CEF, it does include nurses, and chaplains too. A pilot project to digitize full service files on-demand was supposed to be in the works for Summer 2009, but that wasn't mentioned in the interview. I hope that is still on track as this will be an exciting new initiative from LAC, of great value to genealogists.

She also mentioned the popularity of the Canadian census and highlighted available land records as well - and said that, in partnership with Ancestry.ca, all the historical census images will be on-line by the end of this year. (Another clue that this project is behind?) She did not mention the question of census indexes, nor previous partnerships, for instance, with FamilySearch which provided the free index for the 1881 census. (Nor did Dick Eastman follow up on that.)

When the Canadian Genealogy Centre was first developed, it had an URL of its own: www.genealogy.gc.ca This still works, although it's not being updated. Access to the Canadian Genealogy Centre on-line is now being promoted through the main LAC web address: www.collectionscanada.gc.ca(Actually www.collectionscanada.ca works just fine and is easier to remember!)

Sylvie was speaking at the NERGC conference about "Discovering Family Treasures in Quebec: What You Need to Know" in a session sponsored by the American Canadian Genealogical Society. I heard her in both Ottawa and Kelowna last year and she is a lively speaker with very useful information and ideas.

Some of Dick Eastman's questions covered French-Canadian records and Sylvie Tremblay is also Genealogist for theAssociation of the Tremblay of America / l'Association des Tremblay d'Amérique. If you have a Tremblay in your family tree, you can get in touch with her through the Association.